Trapped With My Husband's Cruel Brother

I woke up to the smell of coffee and woodsmoke and a voice through the wall that turned my spine to liquid.

"I know you were watching me last night, Harper. The crack goes both ways."

I went completely still under the blankets.

The words settled into the cold air of the room and just sat there, patient and certain, the way Sterling himself seemed to be patient and certain about everything. My face went hot so fast it almost hurt. I replayed the night before in quick, awful flashes — my eye pressed to that crack in the wood, his shaking hands, the photograph.

And then the other thing. The thing I'd done after I pulled away from the wall.

Had I already changed into my sleep shirt by then? I ran back through it, desperate for the sequence. I'd set my suitcase on the chair — no, the chair was already under the door handle. I'd dug out my sleep shirt first, then noticed the light through the crack, then looked, then—

Yes. I'd already changed. I was almost certain.

Almost.

I grabbed the blanket off the bed and wrapped it around my shoulders like armor and yanked the chair away from the door handle. It scraped loud across the floor. Evidence of everything — the fear, the paranoia, the whole embarrassing production of it. I went downstairs.

Sterling was already in the kitchen. A battered stovetop percolator sat on the burner, and two cast-iron pans held eggs and bacon respectively, everything sizzling at a low, even heat. He was wearing a black henley with the sleeves pushed to his elbows, and in the gray morning light coming through the window over the sink, I could see his forearms clearly for the first time. The scars were there — not tattoos, not marks from a job or an accident. Old scars, deliberate in their placement, faded to silver.

He glanced at me once. Then back at the eggs.

"You were already in your sleep shirt before you looked," he said. "So stop blushing. You didn't show me anything." He slid the eggs onto a plate. A pause, brief and perfectly timed. "Pity."

I sat down at the table and said nothing, because there was nothing to say that wouldn't make it worse.

The coffee was strong enough to strip paint and I drank it in grateful silence while the snow started.

It came down slow at first, the fat lazy flakes that look decorative and harmless. By the time we'd finished eating it was coming sideways.

"Blizzard warning," Sterling said, looking out the window. "Forty-eight hours, maybe more. Road's going to be impassable by noon."

I set my mug down. "I need to call Colton."

"No signal. I told you."

"Then I need to get to somewhere that has signal. Before the road—"

"Harper." He said my name the way you'd say *stop* to a dog about to run into traffic. Flat. Final. "You're not going anywhere."

The snow kept falling. I stared at it and felt the walls of the cabin press a little closer.

"He needs to know you're here," I said. "He didn't tell me. He sent me up here and didn't say a word about—"

"He knows I'm here."

I looked at him.

"What?"

"The house." Sterling picked up his mug. "Key's been with me for seven years. He wanted to send you up here, he had to ask me first." He watched me process that, and his expression didn't change at all. "He knew. He chose not to tell you."

The eggs I'd just eaten sat heavy in my stomach.

Colton had known. He'd looked me in the eye three days ago and said *the cabin will be good for you, it'll be quiet, you need the rest* — and he'd already spoken to Sterling. He'd already arranged it. He'd just decided that was information I didn't need.

"Why," I said. It came out quiet.

Sterling looked at me for a long moment. Something moved behind his eyes, there and gone.

"Not my secret to tell."

He stood up, carried his plate to the sink, and on his way back through the kitchen he picked up the axe leaning against the wall by the back door. He held it out to me.

"Come on. The woodpile's outside. What's in here won't get us through tonight."

---

I had never split wood in my life.

The closest I'd come to any kind of outdoor survival skill was fighting someone for the last box of organic blueberries at the Whole Foods on Houston Street. Sterling watched me take my first swing — handle too high, weight too far back, the axe glancing off the log at a useless angle — and exhaled through his nose in a way that was not quite a sigh and not quite a laugh.

"Again," he said.

The second swing was worse. The blade stuck in the top of the log and I had to wrench it free.

He walked over.

He didn't ask. He just stepped in behind me, close enough that I felt the warmth of him before I felt his hands — both of them covering mine on the handle, adjusting my grip down toward the base. His chest was against my back. His chin was just above my shoulder.

"Choke up less," he said. His voice was low, close, the words landing just below my ear. "Power comes from the hips. Not the arms."

I could smell him — soap and woodsmoke and something underneath both of those things, something warmer and more specific, just skin. My heart was doing something embarrassing and I was acutely aware that he could probably feel it, his chest pressed against my back the way it was.

"Bend your knees a little," he said. "Let your weight do the work."

His breath was warm against the side of my neck. He wasn't moving away. He had all the room in the world to step back and he was choosing, deliberately, not to.

"Focus," he said, and his lips nearly grazed my ear when he said it. "The axe doesn't care what you're thinking about."

I swung.

The log split clean down the center, two perfect halves falling away into the snow.

Sterling stepped back. All that warmth went with him, sudden as a door closing, and I stood in the cold with my hands wrapped around the axe handle and my pulse completely out of control. The snow was still falling. My breath came out in white clouds.

I did not turn around for a moment.

---

The power went out around nine.

No warning, no flicker — just darkness, sudden and complete, except for the fireplace. Sterling added the last of the split wood without comment and settled back against the couch, one arm stretched along the back of it, easy and unhurried, like a man who had never once been uncomfortable in his life. I sat on the floor in front of the hearth with a blanket pulled around my shoulders, close enough to the fire that my face was too warm and my back was still cold.

The blizzard pushed against the windows. The cabin made small sounds — the creak of old wood, the hiss of the fire.

We sat in silence for a long time.

Then Sterling said, "Your husband — does he know what you did after the miscarriage?"

The blood in my veins went cold.

I didn't move. I didn't breathe. I stared at the fire and felt the question settle over me like something physical, like a hand pressing flat against my sternum.

"He doesn't," Sterling said. His voice was quiet. Not cruel. Just certain, the way he was certain about everything. "But I do."

I finally looked at him.

He pushed the sleeve of his henley up — slowly, deliberately — and held his forearm toward the firelight.

The scars caught the amber glow. Neat, parallel lines. Old and silver and unmistakable.

Exactly like the ones on my inner thigh that I had hidden from everyone, for two years, without exception.

The fire popped. Outside, the wind screamed once and went quiet.

I couldn't speak.

"I'm not telling you this to scare you," he said. His arm lowered. His voice stayed even. "I'm telling you because you've been alone with it. And that's the part that does the most damage."

The flames blurred in front of me.

I blinked hard.

The wall between us, the literal one upstairs with its thin crack and its amber light — I understood now that it had never been the real wall. The real one was this. And somehow, sitting in the dark in a blizzard with a man I'd known for less than twenty-four hours, I could feel it beginning to come apart.